Flagship Radeon X800 XT debuts along with junior, the new Radeon X800 Pro

Sound the trumpets! Today ATI has unveiled its Radeon X800 Visual Processing Unit (aka R420) and its new flagship product based on that new VPU: the Radeon X800 XT. The company's answer to NVIDIA's impressive GeForce 6800 has teeth, as we've come to expect from ATI in the last couple of years.

Using the successful low k .13 micron semiconductor process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd., ATI created a scalable, highly parallel and powerful visual processor that is twice as fast as today?s performance leader, the RADEON? 9800 XT. The advanced fabrication process and leading-edge GDDR3 memory have also enabled ATI and its board partners to deliver high-performance, user-friendly graphics card solutions which will work in customer?s existing PCs without requiring radical and costly power supply or cooling upgrades.

/jab. ATI looks to have a hit on its hands with the X800 XT. The card often (not always!) outperforms NVIDIA's latest offering, plus it's more "user friendly". Your average gamer could pop one of these into his system without much worry--something that cannot be said for the power-hungry, PCI-spot eating beast from NVIDIA (more on the NVIDIA offering here). Still, that $499 price tag makes the card a dream for most of us right now, but here's a look at what you might be able to afford in 6 months: 16 pipelines, a 520MHz core, and 256MB of DDR3 memory clocked at an effective 1.12GHz (550MHz GDDR-3). This adds up to a pixel fill rate of 8.3G Pixels/sec. Yummy. The smaller, cheaper X800 Pro brings 12 pipelines, a 475 MHz core, and 256 MB of DDR-3 memory clocked at an effective 950 MHz (475MHz GDDR-3).

Beyond3D's excellent review points out that this product is less a revolution for ATI than an evolution that's focused on merely improving the old R300 architecture's weak spots. This helps to account for the lack of any particularly new features, especially the lack of support for Shader Model 3.0. But if ATI is right and its resources are better spent focusing on the PCI-Express transition and on pushing the seemingly young Shader Model 2.0, they'll have a hot selling card for a while longer. Of course, being bested at OpenGL by NVIDIA may make the card look less attractive to the Cult of Doom 3. You can find reviews from those in good enough graces to receive an NDA-unit from ATI: Beyond3D, HardOCP, Hot Hardware, Lost Circuits, Tech Report. Happy graph gazing!

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher